FIGs are deep, challenging (and fun, too)

Freshman Nicki Truby will never forget the 10-day winter-break trip she took to Ecuador this year, along with leader Catherine Woodward (a botany faculty associate) and other freshman members of a First-Year Interest Group (FIG) called Tropical Ecology and Conservation.

“We were studying the eating habits of woolly monkeys,” Truby
recalls. “That was complicated. Monkeys are on the move and you have to
move with them. We relied on compasses and marking tape to keep from
getting lost in the jungle. There was no cell coverage. The research
station was very isolated.”

A FIG is a group of about 20 freshman students who register for the
same three classes linked by a common theme. They are led by instructors
in seminar courses that help students discover interdisciplinary
linkages during the course of a semester. The idea is to deepen the
learning experience.

It also turns out to be a lot of fun, says Truby.

“We studied together, we got dinner after tests, we talked about how
the things we were learning intermingled with one another,” she says.
“The cohort is just awesome for making friends and launching your UW
experience.”

“

It’s amazing to take what we learned in the classroom and apply it in the real world.

Nicki Truby

Woodward’s popular FIG includes the ecology seminar — Rainforests and
Coral Reefs — plus General Chemistry and one of four Spanish classes.
During winter break, the group takes an optional trip
to Ecuador
where students put their knowledge to work on focused research projects
in the Amazon rain forest. (See the complete list of FIGs here.)

Truby said the experience taught her a lot about how tropical ecology
research works — including things outside the realm of science.

“I used my Spanish a lot because our guide spoke only Spanish,” she
says. “It’s amazing to take what we learned in the classroom and apply
it in the real world.”

Students and faculty say the FIG concept, which began in 2001 and is
administered by the College of Letters and Science, connects freshmen
socially and academically and helps bring the university’s large scale
down to a more personal level.

“Many freshmen end up in classes with hundreds of students,” Woodward
says. “It’s hard for professors to have meaningful relationships at
that stage, when there are so many students. Here, the freshmen get
individual attention.”

This spring, US News & World Report cited UW-Madison’s FIGs program as one of twenty “stellar examples” of learning communities at colleges and universities across the country.

The relationships built in FIGs are often lasting. A few years ago, freshmen in Harry Brighouse’s
Children, Marriage and Families FIG asked the philosophy professor to
create a follow-up class they could take as a group of juniors.

Brighouse developed the class, called Love, Sex and Friendship. “It’s
great seeing how their writing and thinking is improved as juniors.
Some came into the FIG minimally connected, and now are fully excited,”
Brighouse says.

FIGs, Brighouse says, shape better students and stronger teachers.

“They get to know a small group of fellow students, not through the
dorms or parties or student orgs, but because they are reading and
discussing the same academic material,” he says.

When Brighouse began teaching a FIG in 2007, he found that it also challenged him as a teacher.

“I’m a better teacher at all levels. It’s driven by seeing how
inadequate I was with that first group of FIG students,” he says.
“Because of that, I think in terms of how much the students learn and
not how much I teach.”

Students have seen FIGs influence their academic careers.

Colin Higgins enrolled in English Professor Lynn Keller’s
FIG seminar Nature and Culture: How Humans Interact with the Natural
Environment in 2011, thinking he wanted to be an ecologist. But reading
an essay by William Cronon, UW-Madison professor of history, geography and environmental studies, titled “The Trouble with Wilderness,” changed that.

“It fundamentally redefined my path and began my interest in
geography,” says Higgins. “The depth of experience, covering deep
discussions of problems in introductory ecology as well as an
introduction to 20th-century environmental thought allowed me to see the nuance and complexity … of many socio-economic issues.”

In fact, Higgins — who graduated last May with a triple major with
comprehensive honors in history, geography and environmental science — used two essays he read in that FIG during his 2015 interview as a
candidate for a coveted Rhodes Scholarship, which he won.

Woodward often forwards job opportunities, writes letters of
recommendation, and goes to movies and lectures with former students.

“We form a community of learners and friends where the relationship
doesn’t end when you walk out of the lecture hall,” she says.

University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers are studying whether video games can boost kids’ empathy, and to understand how learning such skills can change neural connections in the brain.
“The realization that these skills are actually trainable with video games is important because they are predictors of emotional well-being and health throughout life, and can be practiced anytime — with or without video games,” says Tammi Kral, a UW–Madison graduate student in UW-Madison Department of Psychology who led the research at the Center for Healthy Minds.
https://news.wisc.edu/a-video-game-can-change-the-brain-may-improve-empathy-in-middle-schoolers/